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Mackenzie Brothers

Death of an Everybody Man

November 13, 2016 By Mackenzie Brothers

It has been an awful week for Canadians. On the day before their US neighbours made a mysterious and potentially threatening choice of a leader, Leonard Cohen died in Los Angeles, and on the next day, as he had requested, a plane flew the body of the crown jewel of post-war literature and song, back to his home city of Montréal, and on the day after that he was buried there in the family plot after a private traditional Jewish ceremony.  It was almost twenty years ago that the best German writer of his generation, the very cerebral Durs Grünbein, told me that he really only knew only knew of one Canadian writer, Leonard Cohen, as he had become  the splendid troubadour of the post-war world.  At that time Cohen had  written two novels, one of which received Canada’s highest literary honour, and about ten books of poetry, all of which contained some poems   that had become as well known as any lyrics  written by anybody else in this period. What set him apart from other writers was that he had set a number of his published poems to music, and had made a very successful career singing them. Space here is far too limited  to begin listing the several dozen of these songs which have become part of the repertoire of the twenty-first century’s gathered memory. No other author comes close to matching them.

But the most extraordinary part of Cohen’s career was still to come. Instead of moving at seventy into a well-endowed retirement, he began  anew his travels around the world as a true troubadour would do, presenting these and many newly-conceived poem-songs in  almost 400 concerts over six years, most of them sold out, while expanding the themes of his new songs into a celebration of the broadness of life’s possibilities and the inevitability of the ending of it all.  And he  had widened their scope by  powerfully adding  a foundation of spiritual satisfaction with the whole process that had been missing in his earlier years. And what a group of songs they were (according to his son Adam he was writing on the day he died), culminating in several new disks that were as unexpected as they were triumphant. His last one , “You want it darker” begins with a title song accompanied by the choir from his childhood synagogue in Montreal, and with a Hebrew solo by its cantor. It appeared a couple of weeks before Cohen’s death.  When you look carefully at the full implications of his extraordinary poems about Auschwitz, Hitler and the fate of Jews including his family and that of his Montréal friend, the Rumanian-born Canadian poet Irving Layton,  for whom he served as pallbearer, we can certainly add Leonard Cohen’s name to the small list of the foremost Jewish writers of the post-war period. In the end he completed the circle,  returning in full force to his beginnings in the Jewish section of  Montréal.  Cohen begins Harry Rasky’s film, “The Song of Leonard Cohen”, the best  presentation of his life, by singing  in French the wonderful French-Canadian song “Un Canadién errant”  (“A wandering Canadian”) and admitting on questioning that he feels it pretty much also applies to him.  May the force be with  him.

Filed Under: Canada

Now you CETA, now you don’t

October 14, 2016 By Mackenzie Brothers

Picture this scene. You are sitting in the splendid bier garden in front of the splendid Jagdschloss on Rotkreuzplatz in splendid Munich on a splendid June afternoon, minding your own business while meditating on the Augustiner situated in front of you, when someone comes along and staples a poster on one of the trees affording you shade. Oh no, the political junkies have dared to come into an area off limits to them. One of the Lederhosen or Dindl servers will soon remove this poster but what is it all about? Why, it says STOPP CETA!
What is that? Never heard of it. Read on and you find out it is the proposed Canada-European Free Trade Pact. They never pay any attention here to Canada, unless the hockey team is pummelling the German one, so what do they care about a free trade pact? As it turns out, by mid-October this is the headline event in the papers. On October 27 Prime Minister Trudeau, his photo once again prominently displayed (Journalists just eat up his good looks and youth on a continent where politics is dominated by unappealing old men – Merkel is an exception but not on the youth side), is supposed to sign the CETA agreement, already approved by the EU representatives. But now that the UK has bizarrely left (or so it seems) the European club, the fractures in the among unity of the rest of Europe are becoming more and more evident.
It turns out that CETA, and any foreign agreement approved by the EU must after that be approved by the parliaments of each country. BREXIT has changed the rules on this.  If the Brits can just take their ball and go home, so can anybody else on the supposed team. And anybody else includes some real wild cards these days; Hungary, Austria, Poland, Slovakia, even Denmark and the Nethelands, have very different views about immigration and globalization, for instance, than do Germany and Sweden.
But experts are willing to bet that all of these countries will sign the document when it is on the table in Brussels on October 27.After all, as has been pointed out by many leaders, if you can’t make a free-trade deal with Canada, the non-European land that is closest in its laws and general views to those of Europe, who could they make a deal with?
But they had all forgotten Belgium, the least governable country in the EU. It turns out, as they now all know, that the Belgian constitution says that each of the three main parts of Belgium – the French-speaking Walloons in the south, multilingual Brusselians in the centre and the Dutch-speaking Flems of the north – must agree unanimously or the government in Brussels cannot give Belgian approval. And now it is the Walloons who seem to be leaning to saying no, thus scuttling the whole deal, which took 7 years of negotiate. No doubt they we will be facing tremendous pressure in the next two weeks – the French President is there as we speak – but it may be that this CETA Non-Pact will signal the end of a functioning united Europe – and of the Euro, if it does not get signed on that table on October 27.

Filed Under: Canada, Europe, Germany, Uncategorized

Merkel, Clinton and Trump

October 12, 2016 By Mackenzie Brothers

On October 9, 2008 the day of the second US presidential (so-called) debate in Missouri, Angela Merkel was in Mali, making the very difficult trip to a country torn in half by east/west political and religious disputes that have turned it into a battleground for a brutal civil war. It is clearly one of the most dangerous parts of Africa or for that matter anywhere, and it is widely expected that Canada will soon send special forces troops to join the French contingent there in attempting to help restore order to a battered land, once better known for its splendid music.  And that seems to be the only reason that Kanzlerin Merkel was also there.

It was exactly sixteen years earlier to the day that Angela Merkel  became the Kanzlerin of the recently reunited Federal Republic of Germany. The daughter of a Lutheran pastor in the old East German Peoples Republic, she was relatively young and not very experienced at  50, and it’s  fair to say, in retrospect, that no-one imagined at the time  that she was potentially  a long-term Powerfrau in the tricky world of German politics, and that within a decade she would enjoy a reputation  as  the most powerful and respected government leader  anywhere nor that  she would soon become the most honoured politician in the world.  But in the sixteen years during which she became the longest-ruling leader on a floundering continent where, after a catastrophic war that had ended little more than a half-century before her inauguration,  Germany has under her leadership become the uncontested economic and arguably even moral centre of Europe.
And yet there she was on a day when she could have enjoyed a bright spotlight in Berlin, offering help to a country in great need of it, far from home and very far from a place that could bring her political gains.  At home in this last year she has made decisions declaring  Germany’s willingness to accept  virtually all refugees (almost a million at this point) from a  terrible war zone, and that has cost her some popularity.  But she still says “Wir schaffen es” (“We’ll make it work”) and  she still enjoys the support of more than 50% of the German population.  Most experts believe her party will win the upcoming German election if she decides to run again.

Hard to imagine that on that same day, the two candidates running for Head of State of the United States, still the most powerful military presence in the world, could put on such an embarrassing and demeaning piece of sordid entertainment as the so-called debate.  One can forgive the female candidate, Hillary Clinton, for gradually starting  to look like a smiling robot, since that must have been  because the overwhelming thuggery of her opponent Mr. Trump, often lurking threateningly just behind her,  was something she could not have been prepared for.  But what does it say about the political system that allowed such a spectacle to take place after it slowly simmered into a boil in the course of more than a year?  My advice for Mme Clinton is to take a break after she wins (which she will) and go over to Berlin and have a long talk with  the woman who  has walked the walk rather than just talk the talk.

Filed Under: Africa, Canada, Germany, Merkel

Alternate Olympic medals

August 25, 2016 By Mackenzie Brothers

Gold Medal – for stupidity beyond the pale – Ryan Lochte, USA
Silver Medal – for unrelenting boorishness – Hope Salo, USA
Bronze Medal – for outstanding chutzpah – Justin Gaitlin, USA

 

Any pattern here?

Filed Under: Sports

The Brexit and other comedies

July 19, 2016 By Mackenzie Brothers

Remember the good old days when the very concept of British comedy was not an oxymoron? Shakespeare had several good shows, Alec Guiness and the lads were terrific as a bunch of bungling robbers or, on occasion, even ladykillers. The Carry on Boys carried on in their (to many folks) hilarious ways and Marty Feldman and the crew added a touch of lunacy to the overall mixture. And let’s not forget the young Peter Sellers as a union boss, an Indian second-string actor mistakenly invited to a Hollywood party, or the many-gendered leaders of a mock republic. And to top it all off, there were the incomparable Pythons, who dominated tv for nearly a decade, adding such signature lines   to the general vocabulary as the brave Sir Robin’s admonition to the  band of  (un)happy warriors to “run away, run away” when under pressure, or Sir Gawain’s analysis of his physical condition – “it’s just a scratch” – as his limbs are lopped off  by the giant guardian of the road.

But is has been several decades since the Pythons ruled the comedy world, and it is with a sigh of relief that the world (or at least the European part of it) was treated to a new English comedy team arguably outperforming even John Cleese, Michael Palin, Erik Idle and the lads in their cleverness and creativity on the comedy front.  Now the cast of characters in this fiasco  is supposed  to include a prime minister, who demanded a plebiscite on leaving Europe, on the assumption that it would lose and his female replacement, when it didn’t,   the leader of the opposition (or one of the oppositions) and a windbag of a mayor with a Trump-copied hairdo, who has learned only one thing – to turn with the wind. And amazingly these were all real people, and they got the chance to act out their roles in real history, if their is such a thing, (can the US election really be real?)  and they succeeded in acting with a comic touch that impressed even veteran theatre people, though some thought that their frequent attempts at farce were a bit much.   And then, to top it off, each of the leaders of the Brexit, boys, taking the brave Sir Robyn’s advice to heart, jumped ship after they had won, which they could hardly believe and had no idea of what to do afterwards. (They are not the only ones)  The cartoonists of the German papers could hardly believe their luck as they sketched out the clownish crew racing for the row boats to escape in.  Now some critics have pointed out that this is a  plot too heavily drawn from French bedroom farces (and this at a time when the French Prime Minister is most memorable as the guy who hopped on his vespa wearing a moonman helmet in order to scoot off to his mistress one evening while his bodyguard followed in a car, or was it a bike?). In summary, the prime minister, assuming that his plan would fail, actually had misread the tea leaves and was forced to resign when the votes were counted, the  loud-mouthed supporters of leaving Europe actually had no intention (and no plan) of actually doing so and disappeared as fast as they could, and the new female prime minister immediately named the most outlandish of the Brexiters to be the new foreign minister.  He was met with derision of course by his European counterparts, some of which are real heavyweights unused to clowns and said so.

My brother and I had the great pleasure of being part of an overflow crowd on the day after Brexit in front of the large public-viewing screens in the Löwenbräu Biergarten in Munich, watching the European soccer championship quarter-final match between the Icelandic team, drawn from a country with 330,000 citizens, and England, drawn from a country with about 20o times as many people.  There was a table of Englishman near us, and a table of Icelanders not far away, and they of course each cheered for their home teams, though the English table became silent as the game progressed.  The rest of the crowd was made up mainly of other Europeans , who cheered loudly every time Iceland had the ball and marched triumphantly out onto the streets after Iceland won.  It was of course to some extent just a show of overwhelming support for a complete underdog but it was also certainly also a sign of the dark future for Great Britain’s future relationship with Europe.  And maybe that’s not so funny after all.

Filed Under: Europe, Palin, Uncategorized

And the winner is

May 2, 2016 By Mackenzie Brothers

So what happens next?  Even CNN, the great publicizer of the complete outsider Donald Trump, will discover  that this story  has run out of steam and they will have great difficulty pushing that revved-up political locomotive onto the summer timetable.   The problem is that the main event has already been completed and there is really little  excitement to rev up on how Indiana, or any other last-minute primary state, might vote in the primaries from now on.  Bernie Sanders put in a splendid race for a very long time, but in the end he has no chance of winning this marathon against the too-well connected and experienced front runner, Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump was a newspaper person’s delight in the beginning for putting together  an  amazingly unpredictable sprint  that put him way ahead of his rivals, and left  him on track to continue to pull ahead after the  sprinting should have been history.  He will certainly cross the finish line well ahead of  a catastrophically weak field of supposed  favourites, who had no staying power for the long haul, and in fact dropped out like flies as the checkpoints passed behind them.

So the US is still a democracy and the voters have spoken.  It will be Donald against Hillary for the winner-take all runoff, and already the pundits who were wrong from the start about the Trump candidacy, are  confidently predicting it will be a rout  for Hillary.  Here’s my advice.  Look out for the underdog once again.  Big Donald did not get into this runoff by being a man without a lot of public support,  Au contraire.  He is turning out to have plenty of friends  in a population tired of an overstuffed establishment, and willing to ignore the  fact that Billionaire Don is an obvious high flyer in that group.  His great advantage is, however, that he has never been a politician, like all the other candidates, and made his fortune by other means.   Donald could be gathering his second wind, and some pundits are already suggesting it – that there may still be a long-distance runner out on the streets and the outcome might be much closer than  seems to be the conclusion that the experts,  who were wrong in the beginning, might be predicting once again.

 

 

Filed Under: Republican Party, U.S. Domestic Policy, Uncategorized

Vikings in Panama

April 6, 2016 By Mackenzie Brothers

So – just about everybody you think of as overpaid – from soccer players to petty politicians to tough-guy dictators – have something in common. They invest in Panama Virgin Islands Co-operation companies. And it’s all legal – sort of – and moral – less sort of, but hey what do you expect in the modern world. Non-diving soccer players, truth-telling politicians, people-oriented  dictators? Okay okay, Bernie Sanders is from Brooklyn, where you’ve got to tell the truth or you know what! So he’s an exception. Maybe. And let’s hope he wins, so there is an exception that counts!

In the meantime, as expected from all serious history buffs, only one  society has demanded the consequences. Just as they did in Egil’s or Hrafnkls Saga or the Saga of Grettir the Strong, (until he was exiled to an isolated uninhabited Arctic island), the Vikings of Iceland know how to handle tax avoiders.  Sigmundur David Gunlaugsson (can’t match those Icelandic names), the PM, was caught with  his fingers in the Panama pot, presented himself with the *eatingest grin in photographic history as he entered parliament (the kid was caught with his fingers in the cookie jar as well) and only left it after he had been kicked out of his office, which had been pelted with  eggs and bananas by an angry mob, and joined the ranks of the unemployed – a contemporary mild version of medieval punishments.  No if only the US presidential candidates (pace Sanders)could be convinced after being pelted by eggs and bananas to get the hell out before it’s too late, we would all breathe easier.

Filed Under: Hillary Clintom, Republican Party, U.S. Domestic Policy

America or is it North America the Beautiful?

February 17, 2016 By Mackenzie Brothers

Well, let’s see now. First there were several Republican candidates in the United States of America’s primary drama, led by the indomitable Donald Trump, who suggested that it would be a bright idea to build a Berlin-type wall along the US border. It seemed likely at the time that they had meant the border to Mexico, and perhaps forgotten or did not know that there was also a border in the north with Canada. When it was pointed out that that wall would present mighty challenges in the Rocky Mountains, British Columbia  and  Yukon, not to mention Newfoundland, ST. Pierre and Miquelon, some reconsidered after looking at a map. But some candidates stuck to their guns.

As more information about these candidates dribbles out, Canadians became more and more interested in the proposal for a wall, not because it would keep terrorists from travelling south, but rather because it might hinder  unwanted aliens from travelling north. As it turned out, one of the leading lights, Ted Cruz, was actually born and bred in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, with a Cuban father and an Amurcan mother, and was a Canadian citizen when he announced  his candidacy for President of the United States. . Hmm. Now, the third in the trio of favourites, Marco Rubio, has begun showing an ad for his candidacy on tv in his new series “Morning in America” that makes you wonder just what he means when he uses the word “America”. Does he mean the United States or does he mean all of North America, perhaps excluding Mexico? Who knows?

What most who see this ad will know  is that the scene he opens with is not in the United States. It shows a tugboat sailing out of a very dynamic-looking harbour, obviously recognizable as Vancouver harbour to lots of folks, but for anyone who isn’t familiar with the  scene, there is a Canadian flag flying on the tug just to make it clear. Doesn’t Rubio or his advisors know that on the other side of that northern wall there is an independent country with a different flag than his, which does not call itself America, and that what his ad shows is “Morning in Canada” as the most spectacular and busy harbour city on the west coast of North America  comes to life? Anyhow Ted Cruz is probably thanking the unpredictable primary gods for this intervention in the Canadian irritation in the Republican primary. But Canadians are just wondering what the hell is going on.

Filed Under: Canada, U.S. Domestic Policy, U.S. Foreign Policy

Can pro sports survive?

January 27, 2016 By Mackenzie Brothers

This is obviously a rhetorical question. In many ways pro sports has never thrived more.  The big events, especially among elite participants in team sports – the World Cup of Soccer, Super Bowl of US football, NBA basketball, NHL hockey, even cricket and rugby world cups are more popular and profitable than they ever have been and betting on them is very big business. Although there have been some recent exceptions, most games at the highest level are  beyond the reach of the plague that is now tearing apart all individual sports and second and third rung team sports – results fixed through gambling.  It is  hard to see how a successful offer can be made to convince the extremely high paid stars of the elite tournaments to purposely lose a game.  They are paid too much to be interested in such deals, and in any case, just who could guarantee a loss for such highly talented teams, unless the whole team signs on, and that is not going to happen.

But this is not true of the players and the teams that lurk below the elites, and plenty of bets are made on their games, nor does this theory work as convincingly when it comes to individual sports.   Tennis is only the latest sport to come under serious suspicion, especially with regard to matches played just below the elite level, for which much betting takes place in any case.  Needless to say it is much easier to unexpectedly lose a match in tennis – a bunch  of bad returns, double faults, or sudden injuries will do the trick – than it is for a high-level football, rugby, hockey or basketball team to suddenly collapse.

And soon  we will  have the Olympics,  making its every fourth year stop, this time in Rio.  Poor track and field, the heart of the Olympics and once the mark of the pinnacle of individual performance, has been really seriously, if not fatally damaged by the other kind of cheating – the use of illegal substances to help you win, not lose as is the case in being paid to throw the result.  And the elite athletes in this are no longer anything like the amateurs who once performed.  Great amounts of money are at stake and the Olympic governors have been unable or unwilling to get unlimited doping under control.  This time it seems like the entire Russian track and field team may be banned  for drug abuse, and just about everyone in the know thinks that is just the tip of the iceberg.  The real victims here are the honest athletes who are playing by the rules.  Some of them may even be Russian.  Good luck to them!

Filed Under: Russia, Sports

Another Tale of Two Cities

January 21, 2016 By Mackenzie Brothers

So the statistics are now in for homicides in North American cities in 2015.  Here are a couple for readers to consider.

Baltimore, a US city  has a population of 622,000.

Vancouver, a Canadian city, has a population of 603,500.

Baltimore, in a country which seems to have become ever more enamoured of guns in the last decade , including public display of them, had 344 homicides in 2016, the great majority delivered by such guns.

Vancouver, in a country whose laws aim at strict control of firearms, had 14 homicides last year.  The police reported that  they were disappointed because they like to see homicide numbers in single digits, as it usually has been  in the last years.

Nuff said.

 

Filed Under: Canada, U.S. Domestic Policy, Uncategorized

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